Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Nicholas Hathaway, a furloughed convict, and his American and Chinese partners hunt a high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta. As Hathaway closes in, the stakes become personal as he discovers that the attack on a Chinese nuclear power plant was just the beginning.
Michael Mann's cyberthriller is visually distinctive — shot on digital with his characteristic kinetic intimacy and neon-drenched location work across multiple continents — elevating the cinematography well above average. However, the plot is thinly constructed with unconvincing hacker logistics and a generic conspiracy arc, while the acting is uneven with Hemsworth miscast as a genius convict and supporting performances largely underserving the material. The film's novelty comes from Mann's unmistakable directorial voice applied to the cyber genre, but the narrative itself is formulaic. The ending devolves into a conventional knife fight that abandons the film's technological premise entirely, feeling anticlimactic and tonally inconsistent.